* Update on messaging outsourcing
I have had the privilege of writing this newsletter for five years. My first article was published in January 1999, and it discussed how messaging-related outsourcing was fairly uncommon, practiced by only about 4% of organizations. Today let’s look at what has changed in these last five years with regard to messaging outsourcing.
One of the big changes has been the much broader acceptance of hosted messaging security offerings. Companies like Postini, FrontBridge Technologies, MessageLabs, MX Logic and a number of others have experienced very strong growth.
Part of the growth has been attributable to the rapid growth in spam over the past five years – and over the past three years, in particular. Many organizations were simply caught off guard and needed help dealing with the flood of junk bombarding their e-mail servers. However, the growth in outsourced messaging security is indicative of a growing trend to be less distrustful of allowing third parties to have access to sensitive messaging-borne content, a trend I believe will continue.
What about other outsourced or hosted messaging offerings? There are a large number of companies that provide complete hosted messaging services in which all servers and back-end functions are provided off-site in a third party’s data center.
One of the key markets for these vendors is smaller organizations that want to outsource key IT functions to specialist providers. While this type of outsourcing also makes sense for some larger organizations as well, these potential customers tend to be more resistant to the idea of allowing a third party to have access to messaging content. There are also a number of hosted e-mail and IM archiving companies serving a market that I also believe will grow well in the coming years. We have seen a substantial interest in the use of hosted archiving solutions in just the last quarter.
All of that said, there has been substantial change in the outsourced/hosted messaging market during the past five years, yet some of the trends remain the same.
